How ‘The Lost Boys’ Musical Broke Broadway’s Vampire Curse and the Future of Horror on Stage
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As a dyed-in-the-wool horror fan, titles like The Lost Boys hold a special place in my heart, just like the rest of us. The beauty of the movie is that it means different things to different people. To me, it’s a coming-of-age story about accepting and integrating your dark side. To others, it’s a story about LGBTQ+ acceptance. And yet to some, it’s an exploration of the anxiety around the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Regardless, The Lost Boys is sacred and designated as a property you simply don’t fuck with.
So when I heard The Lost Boys was being adapted into a musical, I had high hopes but heavily tempered expectations. Patrick Wilson producing made me optimistic. Slash’s involvement intrigued me. But then I saw it, and it brought tears to my eyes.
They nailed it.
From the opening vampire kill sequence to the hard-rock soundtrack, including an entire song called “Murder Capital of the World,” the show delivers on nearly every front. The Frog Brothers work. The aerial choreography gives the production a dash of Cirque du Soleil. They even get the motorcycle race and bridge-fall sequences right. And yes, there’s even a greasy sax guy!
But perhaps most striking of all, it was one of the most reactive theater audiences I’ve ever witnessed, more like a rock concert crowd than a typical Broadway one.
However, the real miracle of The Lost Boys: A New Musical is that it doesn’t just respect the movie. It deepens it. The show pays reverence to the original while expanding its characters, mythology, and emotional architecture.
Ask any horror fan how to best adapt a beloved IP, and the answer is often: Don’t. But living in New York has given me an interesting vantage point on what happens when horror movies come to Broadway. Bringing classic horror films to the stage is largely free of the usual remake baggage because the theater doesn’t have to recreate the original. Instead, it gets to resurrect it in a completely different medium, which offers interesting opportunities.
Broadway’s so-called vampire curse was written in the blood of early-2000s flops like Dance of the Vampires, Dracula the Musical, and Lestat, all of which turned the idea of singing vampires into a Broadway no-no. But decades later, The Lost Boys: A New Musical has done something that once felt nearly impossible: it made vampires sing, fly, seduce, terrify, and actually work on stage.
Directed by Michael Arden, The Lost Boys: A New Musical opened on Broadway this past April at the Palace Theatre and shattered that curse, emerging as one of the most-nominated musicals of the 2026 season, with 12 Tony nominations and four wins, including Best Featured Actor in a Musical for Ali Louis Bourzgui as David.
So how did this team take an IP as precious as The Lost Boys, adapt it for the stage to fit Broadway standards, while keeping it fresh, and satisfying fans?
Adapting Lost Boys for the stage fell to Tony-nominated book writers David Hornsby and Chris Hoch, two longtime friends who came at the material from very different corners of entertainment. Hornsby brings sharp comedic instincts from his writing work on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Mythic Quest, while Hoch brings decades of Broadway experience as a performer in shows like Spamalot, Shrek, Matilda, and, fittingly, Dracula the Musical.
Hornsby admitted he was initially hesitant, given the notorious track record of vampire musicals.
“Oh man, this is a big swing,” he recalls thinking. “It’s comedy, but it’s vampires, but it’s horror. I mean, that’s a lot.”
Hoch grew up watching The Lost Boys on a loop at his local West Coast Video, while Hornsby had somehow never seen it. “I ended up watching it with Chris, except he was in New York and I was in LA,” Hornsby says. “So I watched it with him on speakerphone talking over the whole movie.”
Producer Patrick Wilson helped keep the production honest on the horror front. According to Hoch, Wilson was adamant that the show’s scares had to actually work, which sent Hoch deep into the genre archives. “It was very important to him to get the horror right,” Hoch says. “I watched a lot more horror just to try to get on his wavelength.”
One key reference point was The Exorcist III, home to one of cinema’s most famously effective jump scares. “Am I wrong that The Exorcist III has the scariest single jump scare that I’ve seen?” Hoch says. “I was shocked at how well that was done.” By the end of the process, the crash course had apparently worked. “I definitely became a horror fan by the end of it.”
But the challenge was not simply translating a beloved 1980s horror movie to the stage. It was finding a real human spine underneath the leather jackets, motorcycles, blood, and ’80s cool. For Hoch and Hornsby, that spine was family.
“We wanted something the audience could relate to that was outside of the scares,” says Hoch. “That was the real difficult part, and the real trick. So we hung the show on this idea of family.”
For Hornsby, the monsters were always a means to an emotional end.
“The vampires are a vehicle to get them to be a closer family unit,” he says. “Let’s make a show about chosen family, and show all the various versions of a family.”
That frame resonates across the entire show: vampirism as a metaphor for chosen family, LGBTQ+ acceptance, brotherhood, seduction, and the devastating need to belong.
That idea is most movingly manifested in my favorite sequence in the show: Michael’s initiation. The creators intentionally stripped out some of the more jokey elements from the film, including the infamous worms, and replaced them with a haunting a cappella sequence where the vampires beckon Michael to join them. It’s beautiful, chilling, and deeply spiritual in ways the movie never touched.
“The act of harmonizing means you have to be in tune with other people,” Hornsby explains. “So when the story is about family, and we’re showing a brotherhood, people interlaced in harmonies are, in a sense, subconsciously saying, ‘We are one, and we want you to step in and join.’”
For Gabriel Mann, one of the composers of the score, that pull was the whole puzzle.
“We really had to ask ourselves, what’s drawing Michael to David and his gang?” he says. “There’s something otherworldly going on, beyond just wanting to belong to a group of cool guys. There’s probably some kind of power these vampires have. So we imagined this a cappella moment with ancient vibes, and it seemed to really work.”
Mann is one-third of The Rescues, the Los Angeles indie pop-rock trio rounded out by Kyler England and Adrianne “AG” Gonzalez, tasked with writing the show’s score. Known for harmony-heavy, cinematic songwriting, the band came to Broadway from outside the traditional musical-theater pipeline, with songs placed in Grey’s Anatomy, One Tree Hill, Pretty Little Liars, The Umbrella Academy, and Station 19.
That fresh perspective turned out to be a major asset. The Lost Boys could not sound like a traditional Broadway musical with fangs glued on. It had to feel dangerous, sexy, emotional, and authentically rock-driven without simply recreating the soundtrack of the 1987 film. The collaboration between the book writers and The Rescues became central to landing the show’s tone. The music here isn’t simply an accompaniment but one of the production’s driving forces.
Unusually, the music came first. Before there were even book writers, director Michael Arden sent The Rescues off to write a first pass of the score, telling them, as Mann recalls, “Go away. Go make a bunch of stuff, and everybody leave them alone.” By the time Hornsby and Hoch came aboard, the writing job was partly reverse-engineering a story around those existing musical tentpoles. “For us, it was looking at what they have and trying to come up with a structure,” Hornsby says.
Slash’s involvement gave the show another layer of horror-rock credibility. A longtime horror fan who has produced horror films himself, Slash was not just a marquee name. According to Mann, working with him in the studio felt surreal because he was genuinely locked into the material, bringing rock authority and horror-fan enthusiasm. Between Patrick Wilson pushing the scares and Slash feeding the music’s rock engine, The Lost Boys was in great hands.
Then there was the flying.
Rather than leaning on digital screens or shock-value stunts (though there is plenty of blood), Arden and scenic designer Dane Laffrey prioritized stagecraft that evoked beauty and emotional resonance over pure spectacle. The show completely maximizes the aesthetic potential of vampires in flight, leveraging its 3-story-high set to turn floating bodies into a visual language of seduction, danger, and transcendence.
“The ethos of our show was to emphasize the beauty of the world,” says Hornsby. “As opposed to shocking them, let’s make these beautiful moments where we can make people feel. It’s letting people forget they’re in a seat so they can be carried away for a second.”
That, ultimately, is the magic trick of the whole production. The Lost Boys keeps all the coolness of the original movie while giving it a new theatrical body built on heart, harmony, and beauty.
Horror reboots and requels are a well-documented trap. But in recent years, observing Broadway, I’ve come to believe that stage adaptations offer a whole new level of opportunity for horror properties when they’re done right. Hollywood has long understood that horror fans are loyal, rabid, and show up. Now Broadway seems to be taking note.
Between Beetlejuice the Musical, Stranger Things: The First Shadow, The Lost Boys: A New Musical, and the upcoming Paranormal Activity: A New Story Live on Broadway, the stage is becoming an unexpectedly fertile and promising new frontier for beloved horror properties.
The Lost Boys: A New Musical is currently at the Palace Theatre in New York with a North American tour planned to launch in spring 2028. Fly, don’t walk, it ROCKS.
Categorized:Editorials
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